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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Hillary has been quoting Eleanor Roosevelt: "Women are like tea bags -- you never know how strong they are until they get in hot water."Peggy Noonan says Hillary brings her own hot water with her. Well, I'm like that too. It's hard even for the people who like me to like me. Indeed, it's hard to say why we dislike someone. I disliked a guy once because he reminded me of my brother. Who does Hillary remind us of? For half the nation, someone unpleasant. But we can't be ruled by our emotions. Something more objective, like evidence, should decide the matter.

I'm not a policy wonk, and not really all that interested in the fine details of politics. Get the principles right, and the details will fall in line. That's the value of a philosophy. It's why I sent my son Atlas Shrugged. I want him to have a philosophy he can grow out of. Who we used to be makes us who we are. With that in mind, let's look at Hillary, and who she used to be.

Forget about the ancient past. Goldwater girl turned campus lefty. If I were judged by the follies of my youth, I'd be locked away in an attic right now. It's what she does with power that's important. We have to look for patterns. One-off incidents prove we're human. Patterns illustrate our character. In this instance, we really can't separate bill from Hill. They're a team, really they are. When we say he, or she, we do mean they. Fair or not, that's my position.

Given this, what did they do when they were governor? They attempted to rehaul, revolutionize the education system of Arkansas, after which it still ranked last among the states. They attempted to revolutionize the health care system of the US, along mikael moore lines -- thankfully stopped by a once-focused GOP. Just as they took illegal contributions in the '80s, from the Chinese slash Indonesian billionaire Riady family, they took such Chinese monies in the White House, and most recently (that we know of) from Mr. Hsu. They pilfered furniture when they left Little Rock. Same thing as when they left the White House -- actually stole sofas. White trash is such a harsh term.

bill has made in excess of 43 million dollars in speaker fees since his impeachment I mean since leaving office. Fees collected from the ChiComs and the UAE -- a country with "Arab" in its name. Nothing wrong with being Arab, but as Emmett Tyrrell points out, there does seem to be something rather unseemly in the crassness of commercializing the presidency, from selling bed-and-breakfast weekends in the Lincoln Bedroom, to the selling of prestige for astronomical speaker's fees.

They are renowned, really they are, for hardball tactics of intimidation. From Little Rock onward they would hire investigators, Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano, to dig up dirt on opponents -- say, those women whom bill molested. Yeah, they needed even more crap, the sluts. How dare they talk about being molested. Recently the clintons quashed a GQ story by Josh Green (here, here). Intimidation pervades Hillary's personal relationships. Her foul language to bill is understandable. Even her physical strikes upon him. He's a cheater. But she throws books at the backs of Secret Service men's heads -- maybe because they won't carry her bags. It is of a piece with a paranoid view of the world -- almost as if she believed there was some sort of vast rightwing conspiracy against her.

It's not like even the left hasn't been ashamed of them. Emmett Tyrrell:

Very little of this has escaped the notice of journalists and of Democratic leaders. [...] After the Clintons and their siblings were caught in the 42nd president's last-minute pardon scandal, Jimmy Carter called them "disgraceful." Robert Reich opined that "Clinton is utterly disgraced." Al Hunt called Clinton the "albatross" of his party who should "drop dead." Al Gore's campaign manager, Donna Brazile, wrote in The New York Times, "It's time to let Bill Clinton go -- go on and live the rest of his life and allow a new generation of Democratic leaders to renew their fight on behalf of working families in America." New York Times columnist Bob Herbert affirmed that "Bill Clinton has been a disaster for the Democratic Party. Send him packing. … It's time for the Democratic Party to wise up. Ostracism would be a good first step. Bill Clinton should be cut completely loose. … Some of Mr. Clinton's closest associates and supporters are acknowledging what his enemies have argued for years -- the man is so thoroughly corrupt it is frightening."

Editorially in February 2001, The New York Times asserted that "the former president … seemed to make a redoubled effort in the last moments of his presidency to plunge further and further beneath the already low expectations of his most cynical critics and most of his world-weary friends." And the newspaper lamented that it might "never understand the process by which a departing president and his wife come to put sofas and flatware ahead of the acute sense of propriety that ought to go with high office." The New York Observer assessed Hillary's election to the Senate "a terrible mistake," adding that "Hillary Rodham Clinton is unfit for elective office."

These, mind you, are FOBs. Not relevant for Hillary? How would we know? A wife has never followed her husband as president. Good lord -- is there no qualified, respectable Democrat they could select? It isn't only cream that floats -- and we are, after all, talking about the cesspool of politics.

All that is the past. Unfortunately that's not good news. A large chunk of the electorate wants to return to the clintonian past. That would be the 9/10 crowd, nostalgic for the days when we saw no enemies, save for all those sharks eating swimmers off our shores. You remember the Summer of the Shark, don't you? The good ol' days, when only nature was our enemy. Like it is now, what with Global Warming -- although we know the real enemy, the real cause of GW (not George W, in this instance) and 9/11 (in this instance, yes, GW Bush) is us, specifically us white males. Don't ask me, I'm only reporting the phenomenon. And here we are again, full circle, in hot water. Sharks thrashing about after bimbos.

We had a problem with clinton because of his low character and self-seeking -- but mostly because of the disgrace he brought to the office. He did not transcend his limitations, as the office requires. The only growing he did was in his pants. But that's old news. Hillary is shrill and mean and ingenuine. I don't have a problem with this. The problem I have is that I don't believe she loves this country, and doesn't put its interests first. I don't care about her religion or her personal beliefs on abortion or Islam. I care about what she would do and be as president. She'd be another bill, only not driven by her gonads. Driven by what? Alas. Alas. Driven by her love of power.